Guilty of Bad Taste

And we don’t mean the “Bad Taste” 1987 science-fiction comedy horror splatter film about aliens harvesting humans for their intergalactic fast food franchise.

We mean that something is in bad or poor taste when it exhibits poor judgment by being tasteless, unsuitable, unseemly, improper, inappropriate, politically incorrect, impolite, lewd, offensive, insensitive, vulgar, crude, rude, obscene, meanspirited, or uncalled for. It is not a morally wrong action, but the reporting of current events often hypes what is essentially just bad taste by elevating it to a crime or a mental illness.

It should be obvious that the judgment of what is in good or bad taste is pretty subjective, socially entangled, and can be described by hoards of synonymous words.

Of course, we all know what good taste is. It’s what we have, and other people don’t.

Then again, bad taste could just be a failure to police oneself due to some extremely distracting condition, such as intoxication.

It occurred to us, reviewing some of the recent “news” in main stream media, that psychiatry has been (horrors) guilty of labeling bad taste as mental disorders.

Here are some examples of what could be just incidents of bad taste, or related to incidents of bad taste, from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). These are the fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs can be prescribed, and for which insurance will pay the cost.

Adult antisocial behavior

Alcohol intoxication

Caffeine intoxication

Caffeine withdrawal

Cannabis intoxication

Cannabis withdrawal

Child or adolescent antisocial behavior

Cocaine intoxication

Cocaine withdrawal

Conduct disorder

Discord with neighbor, lodger, or landlord

Disinhibited social engagement disorder

Exhibitionistic disorder

Histrionic personality disorder

Insomnia disorder

Intermittent explosive disorder

Narcissistic personality disorder

Opioid intoxication

Opioid withdrawal

Personal history of military deployment

Phase of life problem

Relationship distress with spouse or intimate partner

Sibling relational problem

Social exclusion or rejection

Target of (perceived) adverse discrimination or persecution

Tobacco withdrawal

There are undoubtedly more diagnoses that could fit this categorization.

In other words, by exhibiting bad taste one could be diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs. And who among us has not slipped up and said something they later regret? The point is, bad taste is not a mental illness, but it has been used by the psychiatric industry as a money-maker and a control mechanism by psychiatrists who assert that they know how you should behave in every circumstance.

With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to the “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education, immigration, and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.

It used to be that the term “mentally ill” was limited to mean crazy people like those talking to themselves in the streets and those acting irrationally, oblivious to the world around them. However, the symptoms of mental illness, today, have been re-defined and broadened by psychiatry to fit under the umbrella of any non-optimum behavior, including what is considered normal for that age. Basically, “mentally ill” now is just an opinion about something that a psychiatrist doesn’t like.

Since there is no laboratory test that can identify mental illness or suicide risk, the diagnosis of a mental disorder or of a suicide risk is entirely subjective. Basically, it is the opinion of a psychiatrist who has decided he does not like what a person is thinking or feeling. This is what we mean when we say that psychiatry is being used as a social control mechanism.

The psychiatricizing of normal everyday behavior by including personality quirks and traits is a lucrative business for the American Psychiatric Association because by expanding the number of “mental illnesses” even ordinary people can become patients and added to the psychiatric marketing pool.

People can and do experience depression, anxiety and sadness, children (and adults) do act out or misbehave, and some people can indeed become irrational or psychotic, or be guilty of bad taste. This does not make them “diseased.” There are non–psychiatric, non–drug solutions for people experiencing mental difficulty, there are non–harmful alternatives.